The war of the polls gets a little wearisome for non-wonks, but we’ll keep this short and sweet. The mainstream media are rigging the polls. No headliner there, but just how bad is it? It could mean that Romney has as much as a double-digit lead of 54-44 in Realityville. How, you ask? Because the Democrats are fooling themselves in terms of likely voter party identification and voter enthusiasm.

An Ipsos/Reuters poll trumpets a five point lead for Barack Obama, and since the rest of the media keeps tight as a herd of cows before a thunderstorm, millions believe it. Such “rainmaking,” or using polls to make results instead of report them, is common in the pro-Democrat mainstream media.

But these polls are bogus, to put it mildly. Simply put, the mainstream media are mixing in registered voters (which skews Democrat, even though many might not vote), and playing games with the Republican-Democrat-Independent breakdown.

Rasmussen has this breakdown as about 37.6% Republican (and a record number since November 2002), 33.3% Democrat, and 29.2% “Other.” As the Examiner reports, the Reuters/Ipsos poll has “52.5 percent Democrats, 37.6 percent Republicans and 9.2 independents among the 2,078 registered voters and 1,437 likely voters.”

Thus, Reuters/Ipsos is oversampling Democrats by about 15% and undersampling and misrepresenting Independents. Independents are favoring Romney, not “leaning Democrat,” so it is dishonest to lump together Independents and Democrats.

Many more strongly disapprove of the president’s job in office than strongly approve, the majority dislike big government policies, and most believe the country is on the wrong track. More trust Mitt Romney on the economy, which is overwhelmingly this election’s most important issue, and the president’s lead on foreign policy is shriveling.

If anything, the presidential polling should be neck-in-neck. The only landslide here is the mainstream media’s reputation crumbling and their continued slide into irrelevance.

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Normally, this task is not difficult. Over the years, the black, Latino, young, and elderly proportion of the electorate has been fairly constant from election to election, except for a gradual increase in the Hispanic vote. You just need to look back at the last election to weight your polling numbers for this one.

But 2008 was no ordinary election. Blacks, for example, usually cast only 11% of the vote, but, in 2008, they made up 14% of the vote. Latinos increased their share of the vote by 1.5% and college kids almost doubled their vote share. Almost all pollsters are using the 2008 turnout models in weighting their samples. Rasmussen, more accurately, uses a mixture of 2008 and 2004 turnouts in determining his sample. That’s why his data usually is better for Romney.

But polling indicates a widespread lack of enthusiasm among Obama’s core demographic support due to high unemployment, disappointment with his policies and performance, and the lack of novelty in voting for a black candidate now that he has already served as president. If you adjust virtually any of the published polls to reflect the 2004 vote, not the 2008 vote, they show the race either tied or Romney ahead, a view much closer to reality.

2. Almost all of the published polls show Obama getting less than 50% of the vote and less than 50% job approval. A majority of the voters either support Romney or are undecided in almost every poll.

But the fact is that the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent. In 1980 (the last time an incumbent Democrat was beaten), for example, the Gallup Poll of October 27th had Carter ahead by 45-39. Their survey on November 2nd showed Reagan catching up and leading by three points. In the actual voting, the Republican won by nine. The undecided vote broke sharply — and unanimously — for the challenger.

An undecided voter has really decided not to back the incumbent. He just won’t focus on the race until later in the game.

Add these two factors together and the polls that are out there are all misleading. Any professional pollster (those consultants hired by candidates not by media outlets) would publish two findings for each poll — one using 2004 turnout modeling and the other using 2008 modeling. This would indicate just how dependent on an unusually high turnout of his base the Obama camp really is.

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About Ask Marion

I am a babyboomer and empty nester who savors every moment of my past and believes that it is the responsibility of each of us in my generation and Americans in general to make sure that America is as good or even a better place for future generations as it was for us. So far... we haven't done very well!!
Favorite Quotes:
"The first 50 years are to build and acquire; the second 50 are to leave your legacy";
"Do something that scares you every day!";
"The journey in between what you once were and who you are becoming is where the dance of life really takes place".
At age 62 I find myself fighting inoperable uterine Cancer and thanks to the man upstairs and the prayers from so many people including many of my readers from AskMarion and JustOneMorePet... I'm beating it.
After losing our business because of the economy and factors related to the re-election of President Obama in 2012 followed by 16-mos of job hunting, my architect-trained husband is working as a trucker and has only been home approximately 5-days a month since I was diagnosed, which has made everything more difficult and often lonely... plus funds are tight. Our family medical deductible is 12K per year for two of us; thank you ObamaCare.
But thanks to donations from so many of you, we are making ends meet as I go through treatment while taking care of my father-in-law who is suffering from late stage Alzheimer's and my mother-in-law who suffers from RA and onset dementia as well as hearing loss, for which there are no caretaker funds,
as I continue the fight here online to inform and help restore our amazing country.
And finally I need to thank a core group of family, friends, and readers... all at a distance, who check in with me regularly. Plus, I must thank my furkids who have not left my side through this fight. You can see them at JustOneMorePet.

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